Our founder Oli Lemke had already abandoned
a degree in business administration and had graduated from a brewing degree
when he decided to set up his own brewery. Even more important: He gained
experience, around the world, whilst working for large enterprises in Venezuela
and building breweries in Japan. And with all that experience under his belt,
he welded his first own brewing plant in a friend’s garage in 1998.

With a little help from my friends

Infected
by Oli’s euphoria, his friends turned into builders and helped to transform a
derelict S-Bahn unit at the Hakescher Markt into a brewery. On the 21st
November 1999 his dream became reality: The Brauhaus Lemke opened for the very
first time. During the first few months
we completely overwhelmed our guests with more than 50 kinds of beer, made a
lot of mistakes, but learned new things every day. And survived.

We are

growing

The Tiergartenquelle had been a popular
institution with the students for over 80 years, when it closed to everyone’s
surprise in 2003. We decided to take it on and continue this institution to
sell our Lemke beer. At that point the operations at Hakescher Markt were
running at peak level, and it became increasingly difficult to keep up with
demand. Fortunately in 2004, Leopold’s Brauhaus at Alexanderplatz became
available, which we reopened as the Brauhaus Mitte. In 2007 another Berlin
institution joined us: the Louisenbräu in Charlottenburg. This, the oldest
micro brewey in Berlin, was also the brewery where our founder gained his first
brewing experiences as an intern.

The
same year we doubled our Hackescher Markt location in size. The last extension
took place in 2010, when the Tiergartenquelle was complemented with a beer garden,
which has been extremely popular from day one.

OLI ON THE RUN

We,
the Lemke-Team, now worked together like a well oiled machine, which meant that
our restless founder could follow his other passion every now and again:
building breweries. Needless to say, that German soil was not enough to satisfy
his thirst for adventure; Tenerife and Mongolia wanted to brew good beer too.
Thereby the greatest challenge for the colleagues lay within his return, as he
always came back with a head full of new ideas.

The next step

We decided to start bottling our beers. A
small step for mankind, but a huge step for a small brewery. To prepare for
this next stage we set up our own laboratory including a yeast bank. The
original brewery at Hakescher Markt was converted into the trial brewery where
from then on approximately 200 different brews were undertaken, solely for the
purpose of product development. This is how we make the most exceptional
beers. At this point however, they were
still waiting to be bottled.

LEMKE take out

After years of planning and lengthy
conversions it finally happened: simultaneous with our rebranding, our own
bottling department was being installed. From then onwards our most popular
beers were available in bottles.
Our logo might be new, but our beer remains
what it was and what it always will be: hand crafted from pure natural
ingredients in Berlin.